So uhh I really miss this. Plus Steam doesn’t let you write reviews for games you own on other platforms which is annoying. I have been upkeeping a curator page in the meantime.

Please don’t start sending me hatemail again though.

Anyway, this stupid terrible amazing game.

Detective Penguin is everything I love about indie games: Deeply weird, utterly original, genuinely clever, and incredibly janky. Definitely be honest with yourself about your jank tolerance before buying (mine is, admittedly, absurdly high), but if you’re not sure, maybe also broaden your horizons a bit, because there’s a real diamond in this rough.

There was a lot I loved about this game. I loved how the weird controls were diegetic and kept being plot-relevant. I love that it knew just when to take its characters and plot seriously and when to play fast and loose. I loved how well set up even the more bizarre twists are. I loved how huge the world felt. I loved how many NPCs who are there just to make the town feel alive. I loved, for reasons I can neither explain nor justify, slapping pizza ingredients around the kitchen in a desperate attempt to fill orders like it was some bizarroverse Lego Island. And I also really just liked Finley, the protagonist, who was both empathetic and sincere while also being willing to roll with the weirdness of the mess he’d found himself in. I also found figuring out how to fly the helicopter to be way more satisfying than it should have been. So obvious!

My big complaint was definitely the board sequences, especially that goddamn warehouse. I think they could be fixed entirely by having notched in the floor you had to maneuver the board into, which would preserve the jankiness while also preventing one false move from forcing you to completely restart.

I also have one small and one big story-based complaint.

Small:

Big:

This one feels like a pretty big deal, and I have a hunch it’s one of those things that makes sense in the writer’s head but they forgot to put explicitly in the game.

I also would have loved to see some acknowledgement of that final choice I got to make.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this game. I’d love to see a sequel, especially one that let you get a bit more involved in “solving” cases — perhaps with a text input? And I just find myself wanting to know where Nooter goes next in this weird, oddly deep world.